Seafoam65

Bill, i just bought them.........I only needed one, so i have three to sell if anyone is interested in buying one.......I'll take 65.00 each plus shipping for them.

Before anybody else welcomes Surfgeek to the forum, please be aware that this post is from 2018..........five years ago!

I think that the biggest problem is that only cars that are nice to begin with are being restored and nice cars all require the same identical rare parts to finish them off perfectly and those few rare needed parts cannot be found on beaters like the ones pictured above. Even rusty beaters that are all there in most cases don't have any parts that are useable on a nice car. There could have been a way to prevent this situation but it required a vision that most people simply didn't have. We had an amazing individual involved in the GTO hobby in Texas named Phil Baumann who realized back in the early 70's that GTO's were going to be collectible and that parts for them were already drying up although there wasn't a lot of demand at that time. Phil had the vision to spend all of his spare time going to wrecking yards in Texas and buying all the GTO parts that were nice off every wrecked GTO that came in the yards immediately after the cars came in and he cataloged and housed them in a big warehouse. At the same time he combed all the Pontiac dealerships, buying left over NOS parts on their shelves for GTOs. He did this nearly every weekend for about 15 years. Tragically he committed suicide in the early nineties and his entire warehouse of parts were sold to the highest bidder at auction. I recall that the high bid was somewhere around 250K. The high bidder eventually sold all the parts for millions of dollars in profit and the GTO hobby owes Phil our eternal gratitude. I have a lot of Phil's NOS parts on my GTO........thank you Phil!

I'm trying to help you......you are taking what i said the wrong way.......making a mistake does not mean that you are an idiot.....all of us make mistakes from time to time. that being said, I've been in the car repair business for 50 years, so you might want to heed my advice as i do know what I am talking about. I'm just trying to help you!

Raggedy Ann.........check out everything I told you to check out before trying to start it, and be sure to have the air cleaner on the carb when trying to start it....If it backfires through the throat of the carb it could cause a fire to erupt at the carburetor.....you don't want to burn your house down over this. You can set the points with a feeler gauge before trying to start it. there should be a .016 gap between the point contacts when the rubbing block on the points is on one of the raised peaks on the distributor shaft. also make sure to lubricate the distributor shaft with grease so the rubbing block doesn't wear off on the points.

This is the craziest post I've ever read! Raggedy Ann stated that spark is coming out of the coil wire but not the plug wires. The fact that the coil is shooting out spark means that the points and condenser are fine. If what she is saying is true, only the cap, coil and and rotor can cause such a problem. it sounds to me like a very idiotic mistake is being made in replacing the cap, rotor, coil and wires. Raggedy Ann, here is how you check out your problem...... hold the end of the coil wire that goes into the center of the cap close to a ground on the engine and see if a hot spark shoots out of it while turning the engine over with the starter......the spark should be hot enough to jump a half inch gap. If it sparks but is veryweak, you have got the plus and minus wiring going to the coil hooked up backwards. ( the wire coming out of the bottom of the distributor goes to the minus side of the coil and the wire coming out of the engine wiring harness from the firewall goes to the plus side. This is the most likely mistake that you made. Also be aware that although the rotor has a square peg on one side and a round peg on the other, it is possible to install it backwards......I've seen plenty of novices do just that. when you changed the wires, did you transfer them one at a time in the correct hole so as not to cross them? Here's how to check to see if you botched up the wire installation. The firing order is 18436572. The driver's side cylinders of the engine are numbered 1357 front to back, while the passenger side is 2468 front to back. There is a round dimple on the vacuum advance bracket that lines up with the number one spark plug wire hole on the cap. Make sure you have no. 1 wire plugged into that hole. From there the wires should be installed in a clockwise fashion by the firing order of 18436572. Check out these things and report back. The car was running before you messed with it, so don't change any more parts......go back and find out what is wrong with what you've already done.

PM sent.

Not pictured is the 428 tri-power Pontiac V-8 under the hood....that is an awesome car/

No need for a diagram......you have to remove the bumper(ten minute job), then turn the bumper upside down on a matress or padded table and remove the fasteners that hold the tail light assemblies in place......very simple. Once you remove the fasteners the tail lights come right off. When removing the bumper you will first need to unplug the tail lamp harness from behind the bumper.

I think it would be pretty easy to replicate that front end treatment.....love the way those single headlamp beams look. Are there any existing photos of the rear of the car?

As everyone knows by now, I'm a purist when it comes to collector cars, but I would like to see someone take a 63 Riviera and restore it as a Cadillac to show what the car would have been like if it was a Cadillac as Bill Mitchell intended. Of course it would have Lasalle II emblems, a 63 vintage Cadillac V-8, Cadillac steering wheel, etc. I think if it was done right it would be fabulous.

If you have a working emergency brake you can stop the car with any sort of hydraulic failure.......takes two seconds to apply it if the pedal goes to the floor, so in my opinion, the dual master cylinder doesn't make the car any safer, but does give some people a false sense of security.

It can only be the master cylinder is bad or the push rod on the booster is too long. Bad brake hoses can do this but you said you changed them already.

Yes, this was a stock example. A new trend that has surfaced over the last couple of years is people taking a stock numbers matching nice 65 Riviera GS and building a mod rod out of it with an LS Chevrolet V8 under the hood, all Riviera, Buick, and GS emblems removed in the process. To me this qualifies as total insanity, but I know of 4 cars that this was done to in the last couple of years. If this trend continues, the stock ones that remain will be pulling down 500K before long.

What I did is purchase the manuals on computer disc........they are available that way online.

Two things to note.......the quick way to check for an exhaust leak and find it is to pour some transmission fluid down the throat of the carburetor while it is idling.....if you have any exhaust leak it will smoke like crazy from that location. Also I would note that the reason the harmonic balancer bolts get loose is because someone had it off and didn't torque it properly when reassembling it. The torque spec on the balancer bolt is 220 foot lbs. People who don't know any better torque them to about 90 foot lbs. and they fly apart after a little while.

I am selling the original steering wheel off my Riviera, as I changed it over to the optional wood steering wheel. this wheel looks almost NOS, has one tiny crack that is very difficult to see where the center bar meets the rim on the right side....would be very easy to fix. The horn bar is flawless in every way and looks like an NOS part, no flaws in the chrome or the plastic in the horn bar. This is the nicest original 65 Riviera steering wheel that I have personally seen. Price is 150.00 including shipping to the 48 states. Note: You will need to reuse the horn contact parts off your old wheel. I am selling the horn bar and the wheel only.

I don't know if it's just blind luck, but I know the complete history of all my cars, names of all the owners and what dealership sold them originally. It would drive me nuts owning an old car that I didn't know anything about it's history. My 65 Riviera was special ordered from Ken Nelson Buick in Dixon, Illinois in January of 1965. When it arrived at the dealership in February, the car transport driver backed it off the transport truck and into a concrete foundation for a giant pole lamp in the parking lot of the dealership, ruining the back bumper and putting a dent in the rear corner of the quarter panel. The dealership body shop repaired the dent and installed a new bumper but the repair was poorly done and the paint didn't match where they spotted it. The guy who ordered it refused to take delivery of the car and ordered another one. It sat on the dealer's lot until May of 1966 when the front end/alignment mechanic at the dealership purchased it at a discounted price. He kept it for one year, but never drove it in the wintertime when the roads were salted. In May of 1967 that alignment mechanic sold the Riviera to the mechanic that worked in the bay next to him, and he kept it until 2011, never driving the car in the rain, never letting it get wet.......never washed the car with a hose, just wiped it down with a damp towel after every use, and he only drive it on nice days in the summertime.....never in the rain, and it was always in a climate controlled garage when not being driven. This man had a next door neighbor who had begged him for years to sell him the car, saying it was his dream car. The mechanic finally relented and sold it to the guy at a very good price, and the neighbor then proceeded to flip the car at a big profit to the owner of a Buick dealer in a neighboring town that wanted to display it in his Buick showroom. This enraged the mechanic and he is not on speaking terms anymore with the flipper next door neighbor. In 2012, the Buick dealer decided to sell his dealership and the new owner of the dealership didn't want the car, and it was sold on consignment by a collector car dealer, who wound up selling to a guy who lived in Las Vegas in January 2013. A few months later the new owner in Las Vegas learned he had terminal cancer and the car was once again put on consignment with a collector car dealer right off the strip in Las Vegas and 15 minutes after they posted the ad on the internet on a Monday morning I found the ad for the car on the internet along with tons of photos, and I bought the car sight unseen 30 minutes after the ad was posted. The car was so nice that I knew somebody else would buy it before I could fly up to Las Vegas to look at it. I had the car shipped to Texas and when it arrived, it was even nicer than I had expected........pics of the car being delivered to me are shown below......

I'm planning on making the trip to Kalamazoo.........Very nice area.....my Aunt and Uncle retired to a log cabin just outside of Kalamazoo on 40 acres back in 1975......I used to drive up and visit them every three years or so for Christmas. Their next door neighbor had a horse drawn sleigh and we would ride the sleigh, drink whiskey to keep warm and sing Christmas Carols..... lot's of great memories. Looking forward to seeing it again........I've never seen it without snow on the ground.

Originally owned by my wife's grandmother who would back it outside of the garage whenever it rained to get a free car wash and who owned a pet rat who enjoyed chewing on the interior.....only 418,000 miles on the car..........there fixed it for you!

Are you saying that the ball joint would be pressed out on the side shown in the picture, and that the socket to back it up would be large enough for the joint to pass through the middle of it on the way out?

Have you verified that the ignition key is cut according to the original key codes from the car's original paperwork?

Use 10W30 (I recommend Mobil 1) and with each oil change add a bottle of ZDDP to give your oil the zinc additive to protect the flat tappet camshaft from wear. The zinc was removed from modern oils because it damaged emission controls on late model cars. Mobil 1 is an amazing product......since I started using it shortly after it came out I've never had any sort of internal mechanical failure on any of my car's engines, even after running some of them 350,000 miles. When I used to use conventional oil my engines would have an internal failure usually between 100,000-150,000 miles.

No, Ed the 65 Riviera does not have that feature. No way to start it without a key

Bernie.....could you please elaborate on how you took apart the ends on the center link?....I would like to know how it is done. Also how does it go back together? The whole thing looks to me like it is bradded together by some sort of machine and is not serviceable with hand tools.